Angry Birds Go! (their emphasis, not ours) is the next big entry in the Angry Birds franchise, first teased back in June by the Finnish bird-flinging game company. The game takes the "universe" of Angry Birds and applies it to downhill cart racing; it'll even accept new karts in the form of ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/EMBSny4EByg/London (AFP) - The press Wednesday celebrated England's passage to the 2016 football World Cup on an "utterly magnificent night" at Wembley, but played down hopes of glory in Brazil.
Goals from talismanic striker Wayne Rooney and midfielder Steven Gerrard helped England to a 2-0 win over Poland at a noisy Wembley, which contained around 30,000 away fans, and ensured they finished top of group H.
"Off to B-roo-zil", said the Sun's back-page headline, in praise of England's goalscorer.
The tabloid took partial credit for the result after urging readers to rub a pair of lucky Brazil nuts printed in Tuesday's edition.
The Daily Mail carried a picture of Rooney's headed goal on its back page, along with the headline "Heading for Brazil".
The paper's chief sports writer Martin Samuel praised England's "positivity" over their last two matches and hailed often-criticised manager Roy Hodgson for picking Tottenham rookie Andros Townsend, who put in another dynamic performance on Tuesday.
The Daily Telegraph ran with the headline "Happy and Glorious" across a photograph of a celebrating Rooney.
"This was a raucous, draining and utterly magnificent night," said Henry Winter.
"No play-offs, no summer off, England are off to Brazil."
He lauded Hodgson's ability to rise above the critics, but issued a word of warning.
"Vastly superior opposition await in Brazil," he wrote. "Some of the youngsters like Andros Townsend are maturing promisingly but need to deliver week in, week out.
"Yet this was a time to celebrate."
The Times said England had provided a "timely reminder that international football is still alive and kicking."
The Guardian's front-page also carried a picture of Rooney next to the headline: "The boys for Brazil", but also played down their chances in next year's tournament.
"England expects. Although perhaps not, in the circumstances, that much," wrote Barney Ronay.
"For all the bravura attacking enthusiasm of England's two-legged qualification finale, there will be a sense of caution about exactly what might be in store in Brazil.
"Roy Hodgson will have no illusions both about the moderate strength of Group H and also the likely effects of allowing one of the tournament favourites the same kind of space in midfield Poland enjoyed at times," he warned.
Environmental groups are fighting to stop the leveling of 154 acres of coast redwoods and Douglas firs to make way for grapevines.
Environmental groups are fighting to stop the leveling of 154 acres of coast redwoods and Douglas firs to make way for grapevines.
In the California wine mecca of Sonoma County, climate change is pitting redwood lovers against red wine lovers.
This Friday morning, a coalition of environmental groups are in a Santa Rosa, Calif., courtroom fighting to stop a Spanish-owned winery from leveling 154 acres of coast redwoods and Douglas firs to make way for grapevines.
Redwoods only grow in the relatively cool coastal region of Northern California and southern Oregon. Parts of this range, such as northwestern Sonoma County, have become increasingly coveted by winemakers.
Chris Poehlmann, president of a small organization called Friends of the Gualala River, says the wine industry is creeping toward the coast as California's interior valleys heat up and consumers show preferences for cooler-weather grapes like pinot noir.
"Inexorably, the wine industry is looking for new places to plant vineyards," says Poehlmann, whose group is among the plaintiffs.
California's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire, approved the redwood-clearing project in May 2012.
"So we sued them," says Dave Jordan, the legal liaison for the Sierra Club's Redwood Chapter, another of the plaintiffs. The Center for Biological Diversity is the third plaintiff.
The groups filed suit in June 2012 on the grounds that state officials violated California's environmental protection laws by approving the plan.
Redwoods are considered among the most spectacular of all trees. The biggest trees on Earth by height, redwoods can stand more than 350 feet tall. Some are more than 2,000 years old.
However, the redwoods at the center of this conflict are not old-growth trees. The area was clear-cut more than 50 years ago, and most of the redwoods on the site are less than 100 feet tall. Which is why Sam Singer argues: "There are no forests [on this site]."
Singer is a spokesman for Artesa Vineyards and Winery, which is owned by the Spanish Codorniu Group and which first proposed the development project in 2001. Singer says that the two old-growth redwood trees on the property will be spared.
But the thousands of trees slated for removal are between 50 and 80 feet tall, according to Poehlmann. He says the trees provide wildlife habitat and stabilize the soil against erosion, which has been a major problem for streams in the area that once harbored runs of salmon and steelhead trout.
Coast redwood trees stand at Muir Woods National Monument in Mill Valley, Calif. Redwoods are the biggest trees on Earth by height — they can grow more than 350 feet tall. But their range is quite limited: They only grow along the coast of Northern California and southern Oregon.
Coast redwood trees stand at Muir Woods National Monument in Mill Valley, Calif. Redwoods are the biggest trees on Earth by height — they can grow more than 350 feet tall. But their range is quite limited: They only grow along the coast of Northern California and southern Oregon.
The project planners have even estimated this timber to represent 1.25 million board feet of "merchantable" lumber.
Dennis Hall, a higher official with CalFire, says his department's approval of Artesa's project in 2012 came only after a lengthy review process found that it would not significantly damage the environment.
"We did an [environmental impact report] for the project," Hall says. "It was an extreme and exhaustive analysis of potential impacts to the environment." The report deemed most of these potential impacts to be "less-than-significant."
Still, Poehlmann feels CalFire has been too lenient on proposals by developers to level trees. "They are acting as if they are actually the 'department of deforestation,' " he says.
The tensions go beyond this case: Friends of the Gualala River and the Sierra Club's Redwood Chapter have gone to court several times in the past decade to successfully stop timberland conversion projects proposed by winery groups and which had been approved by the state. Among these fights was the battle to save the so-called Preservation Ranch, a 19,000-acre parcel that developers planned to partially deforest and replant with vines. Earlier this year, the developer sold the property to The Conservation Fund.
But from 1979 to 2006, 25 conversions of forest to agriculture occurred in Sonoma County at an average rate of 21 acres per year, according to county officials.
At least a few tree-clearing projects have occurred without permission. High-profile winemaker Paul Hobbs didn't bother getting a permit before he leveled 8 acres of redwoods in 2011 with plans to plant wine grapes. He remains a superstar winemaker and was tagged earlier this year by Forbes as "The Steve Jobs of Wine."
And it's not just redwoods that are at stake as vineyards expand their terrain. California's oaks aren't subject to the same environmental protections as more commercially valuable species like redwoods and Douglas fir, according to CalFire's Hall. And Northern California's oak forest, near the coast as well as inland, is being lost at fast rates to vineyard expansions, says Adina Merenlender, an environmental biologist with the University of California, Berkeley.
Merenlender says oak trees tend to be overlooked by the general public, which is more easily impressed by redwoods. Yet oak forests, she says, provide habitat for vastly more species than do redwood forests.
Sara Cummings with the Sonoma Vintners, a wine industry trade group, says new vineyards are usually planted within what she calls the region's "agricultural footprint" — land that is already designated by county planners as "agricultural." Moreover, she says, more than half the county's wine growers are members of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program.
But Merenlender is concerned about future expansion into land not previously farmed.
"We're already seeing a lot of acquisition of coastal lands," she says. "Investments are moving north and west, toward the coast."
The issue, it seems, is a global one. A 2013 study predicted that global warming will cause a dramatic shift in the world's wine regions. The report warns that wilderness areas in British Columbia and remote regions of China — one of the world's fastest-growing winemaking regions — may become increasingly coveted by the industry.
"But at least we'll have plenty of wine to drink, "Poehlmann quips, "while we bemoan the fact that our forests are all used up."
If your smartphone is slowing down but you haven't yet been able justify purchasing a new one, here's a tool that can help. Benchmark & Tuning is a geek's dream because it tests the phone's CPU along with memory and input/output capabilities -- your device's power, in other words. It also lets you compare your phone's performance with that of other common devices out there using crowdsourced benchmarks.
Christian Göllner's Benchmark & Tuning (Full) app is available for US$2.99 in the Google Play store.
Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there.
If your 2-year-old, or so, phone or tablet seems a bit sluggish compared with the speed at which your colleagues and friends whizz through their smartphone-related tasks, the answer is that it probably is.
As we know, devices are frankly dinosaurs at a year old, and this app will conveniently prove it so that you can comfortably go to the store and buy a new device -- guilt free and with no spousal recriminations. After all, you have documented evidence. How's that for $2.99?
Benchmark & Tuning is actually a geek's dream because it tests the phone's CPU along with memory and input/output capabilities -- your device's power, in other words.
If you ever dreamed of being as a space rocket engineer, surrounded by dials and meters in the lab, calculating optimum thrusts and so on, this will do for you the same thing, but it's for us, the smartphone wielding proletariat.
The Features
Benchmark & Tuning (Full) works by crowdsourcing benchmark comparisons. This means comparison data comes from fellow users, rather than from possibly inflated benchmarking stats from phone marketing departments.
There's been a flurry of accusations aimed at phone makers in the media recently. Suggestions are that their numbers are inflated. The use of this app for comparisons means that you're not using that dubious, and conceivably rigged, data.
The second key feature is that rooted users can set a governor too. Rooting is a process that Android enthusiasts use to gain control over the operating system. Ordinarily, you'd need two apps to do all this. One app for benchmarking, and one for tuning.
I had a blast playing with the app and was delighted to find that all of the devices I tested performed poorly. This means that I'm gathering ammunition for eventual upgrades cross-gadgets.
Unfortunately, because I, along with vast numbers of other U.S. consumers, have moved over to a prepaid smartphone plan -- I'm using Sprint MVNO Ting in the city and Verizon Prepay in rural areas -- I don't have the benefit of subsidized handsets anymore.
It's no longer a case of waiting for a two-year upgrade and automatically getting the latest, fastest phone. It's now a two-to-three year, or maybe longer full-cost proposition, so it involves some thought and research. This app fits the arsenal nicely.
I tested three of my devices. One device, a Motorola Photon 4G, came in 19th out of 25 overall; a Toshiba tablet came in 15th; and a cheap Galaxy Y miniphone came in at a super-bad 23rd. The Galaxy Y was purchased to function as a wireless hotspot only, so I expected lame results. However, I was quite surprised about the poor performance of my other devices.
If you're interested, as of the day I tested, the HTC One S came in first overall, Samsung's Galaxy SIII second and the Asus Transformer Prime TF201 third.
This being a geek's plaything, you'll see when you run tests that some stock devices have been reported with better this-than-that -- processor power than memory, for example.
Interestingly, the top seven -- which included the HTC One X, 5.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 and two 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tabs -- all had roughly the same I/O results.
All the same performance in the real world?
Peculiarly, there wasn't a Samsung Galaxy S IV result on the list. The S IV is Samsung's latest and greatest. I don't know why it was omitted, but it skewed the results somewhat.
Overall, though, this app is a must-have if you're contemplating a new-phone investment and don't trust the manufacturer's numbers.
Is there an Android app you'd like to suggest for review? Something you think other Android users would love to know about? Something you find intriguing but aren't sure it's worth your time or money?
Please send your ideas to me, and I'll consider them for a future Android app review.
Justin Bieber's life is not as charmed as one might think.
The singer laments about smiling through his pain as a musician -- putting on shows for millions of screaming girls while his life behind the scenes may be crumbling -- in the latest promo for his upcoming doc Believe.
PHOTOS: Justin Bieber's 'Believe' Tour in Pictures
"You always gotta keep a smile on your face through all the negativity," he says. "You gotta hide your emotions sometimes, especially for me going onstage."
In what appears to be a reference to ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez, Bieber says: "I could be going through a big argument and I'm like, 'I'm about to go onstage right now.' And we're yelling, and then I gotta rise up on the toaster."
"It's like, I'm upset. I don't want to have to smile and put on a happy [face]," he continues, "but sometimes you just gotta suck it up and that's just one of the things you gotta deal with being in this position, in this world, in this industry."
PHOTOS: Justin Bieber by the Numbers: 18 Key Stats From His Music Empire and Beyond
The Never Say Never big-screen follow-up, directed by Jon M. Chu, hits theaters Christmas Day. To drum up buzz for his latest project, Bieber will release a new clip from the film every Friday (#FilmFriday) and a new song each Monday (#MusicMonday).
Watch the latest promo below.
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 17-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Rob Gutro
robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Tropical Storm Priscilla lived just 3 days in the eastern Pacific Ocean making for one of the shortest-lived tropical storms of the season.
Priscilla skipped the depression phase and went from a low pressure area to a full-blown tropical storm at 5 a.m. EDT/0900 UTC on Oct. 14. Priscilla formed near 14.3 north and 115.7 west, about 705 miles/1,135 km southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Priscilla moved north-northeast and had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph/65 kph at birth.
On Oct. 15 Priscilla had already weakened to a depression because of wind shear and the arrival of more stable air into the environment around the tropical storm.
At 5 p.m. EDT/2100 UTC, Priscilla's maximum sustained winds dropped to 35 mph/55 kph. The center of tropical depression Priscilla was located near latitude 17.7 north and longitude 117.5, about 610 miles/980 km southwest of the southern tip of Baja California
Priscilla was moving toward the west-northwest near 8 mph/13 kph and this general motion is expected to continue through Oct. 16.
A GOES-West satellite visible image on Oct. 15 at 2215 UTC/6:15 p.m. EDT that showed the bulk of precipitation west of the center from wind shear.
By Oct. 17, Priscilla was a post-tropical cyclone. The last bulletin issued by the National Hurricane Center pinpointed the center near 18.7 north and 120.9 west, about 765 miles west-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The post-tropical cyclone was fading fast as sustained winds dropped to 25 knots/28.7 mph/46.3 kph. The National Hurricane Center noted at 0300 UTC on Oct. 17/11 p.m. EDT Oct. 16, that Priscilla ceased to qualify as a tropical cyclone.
###
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 17-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Rob Gutro
robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Tropical Storm Priscilla lived just 3 days in the eastern Pacific Ocean making for one of the shortest-lived tropical storms of the season.
Priscilla skipped the depression phase and went from a low pressure area to a full-blown tropical storm at 5 a.m. EDT/0900 UTC on Oct. 14. Priscilla formed near 14.3 north and 115.7 west, about 705 miles/1,135 km southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Priscilla moved north-northeast and had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph/65 kph at birth.
On Oct. 15 Priscilla had already weakened to a depression because of wind shear and the arrival of more stable air into the environment around the tropical storm.
At 5 p.m. EDT/2100 UTC, Priscilla's maximum sustained winds dropped to 35 mph/55 kph. The center of tropical depression Priscilla was located near latitude 17.7 north and longitude 117.5, about 610 miles/980 km southwest of the southern tip of Baja California
Priscilla was moving toward the west-northwest near 8 mph/13 kph and this general motion is expected to continue through Oct. 16.
A GOES-West satellite visible image on Oct. 15 at 2215 UTC/6:15 p.m. EDT that showed the bulk of precipitation west of the center from wind shear.
By Oct. 17, Priscilla was a post-tropical cyclone. The last bulletin issued by the National Hurricane Center pinpointed the center near 18.7 north and 120.9 west, about 765 miles west-southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The post-tropical cyclone was fading fast as sustained winds dropped to 25 knots/28.7 mph/46.3 kph. The National Hurricane Center noted at 0300 UTC on Oct. 17/11 p.m. EDT Oct. 16, that Priscilla ceased to qualify as a tropical cyclone.
###
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
VMware has rolled out expanded support for non-VMware workloads in its management tools, including the added ability to manage OpenStack clouds and providing better visibility into Amazon and Microsoft clouds.
The moves reflect VMware's desire to be a central management platform for multiple types of workloads in an IT shop. They also highlight the delicate nature of the cloud computing industry in which there are resources from various vendors, forcing companies like VMware to balance between encouraging customers to use their services, but also supporting competing platforms.
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[MORE VMWOLRD NEWS: VMware acquires Desktone, makes network virtualization generally available]
Just a few years ago VMware was fighting criticism that it locked customers into its platform, but since then the company has embraced a multi-cloud management strategy. That was exemplified by the purchase last year of DynamicOps, which is a company that specializes in management of workloads from multiple types of hypervisors.
Today, the company continued that strategy by announcing major updates to its management software. The 6.0 release of vCloud Automation Center, which automates the delivery of IT services, now includes Red Hat OpenStack clouds. It had previously supported not only VMware, but Amazon and Microsoft cloud workloads. Automation Center can now automate the delivery of virtual networking from VMware's NSX group, too. VMware also launched a tool that allows users to compare the price of on-premises resources with those in a public cloud.
A new version of vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 includes expanded capabilities for users to glean insight into how their VMware, AWS and Microsoft Hyper-V-powered workloads are performing. The software provides analytics and information about configuration errors for those platforms. "VMware is not just a vSphere company anymore," says Martin Klaus, a spokesperson for VMware's cloud management division. "We have very broad management capabilities for delivering IT as a Service."
Mary Turner, an IDC analyst who tracks the IT management industry, says the view VMware has evolved to support reflects the reality of the market today. "Increasingly there is a recognition that the future of cloud and enterprise data centers is going to be hybrid," she says. "The fact that VMware is investing to support a range of cloud platforms makes a lot of sense in terms of what the market wants."
The market for cloud and IT management platforms is hot and growing, Turner says. Other vendors include BMC, IBM, HP, Red Hat through its ManageIQ acquisition, Citrix and even Microsoft and OpenStack. These management platforms become the "face of the cloud" for end users, Turner says, because they control provisioning and deprovisioning of resources, as well as setting policies regarding which employees are allowed access to which resources. They can also provide analytics and metering of services. A lot of companies want to occupy that valuable real estate within enterprise IT shops. "It's a very dynamic market," she says. "What VMware is doing is making sure that it's in the mix."
Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.
